Re: [AUDITORY] Note durations in music ][

[Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I still remain confounded partly by the question, as I perceive it as being incomplete.

I do not hear music / melody as being 'notes in a line', and cannot abstract melody as a sequence of durations of notes in a piece. I hear this as being at a sub-vocabulary level. In written language, something similar to working out the frequency and order of circles, three-quarter circles and semicircles, to quarter-circles in letters in a printed text.

The letters o, pdbqg, c, e, s, m, n, r, j etc, using this shape in progressively incomplete form.

The tune Happy Birthday, played staccato or legato, will have the same identity. As an instrumental performer, I played this as long-short long, but in singing with untrained people, the rhythm is short-short long. In the short-short-long version, the rhythmic isomorphic nature to the Star Spangled Banner is lost. [I have a conflated  version of Happy Birthday for anyone interested.].


I am not an ethnomusicologist.

In the example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2ntQK9F4bw
Malladi brothers - Guru Poornima - 2 July 2012
starting around 5:25 in order to meet the criteria of the request, for me, the duration of the 'notes' [sic] is entirely hierarchical. At this point in the piece, the very short notes of the performers are ornamental to the principal note.
Observe the audience at around 7'10, and the singers throughout placing the 'rhythm' within the broader underlying cycle.

I seem to understand [after about 9'15], that the shorter notes are structural at the end of the song. Starting in the second song, c 10'00, there appear to be multiple interpretations of the structure of the underlying cycle [watch the performers and audience members' hands].

I think these [kritis] are both by one of the most famous Carnatic composers Thyagaraja.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyagaraja


It is noted by western music theorists that there is no large body of theoretical writing on the subject of "rhythm" [sic] in western music. Even the touchstone of intelligent research, Wikipedia, does not seem to be able to unshackle itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm
conflating rhythm with pulse, beat and meter. The ancient Cooper & Meyer, "The Rhythmic Structure of Music", University of Chicago, 1960, ISBN 0-226-11522-4, seems from another century.


Kevin




On 2013, Jun 16, at 1:00 AM, Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Having pondered the question and the responses for a few days, I still am not clear on the core issue. For me this is partly tied up with the lack of definitions of the term "note". In my classes I try to avoid the word without  specific context to delimit the meaning.
> 
> There are two [or more] possible interpretations here:
>   [1] onset time to onset time
>   [2] duration of the sounding element
>      [2a] adding the duration of any non-sounding element[s] -- rests or silences
> 
> There is not a great deal of solo monophonic music in the classical western music repertoire compared with the quantity of music that has more than one pitch sounding at one time.
> 
> Within the solo monophonic repertoire, composed music which is beyond being a very simple tune, eg God Save the Queen played on a flute, is very often working to create the illusion of more than one pitch at a time. To see this in a very simple / complex example, take the Bach Prelude in C Major from book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier. It can be played with one finger. It can also be heard as a five-voice homophonic composition.
> 
> Since the well-known repertoire is so small, it is likely a matter of going to some much more relatively obscure sources, such as Johann Quantz
> http://imslp.org/wiki/Fantasies_and_Preludes_for_Flute_(Quantz,_Johann_Joachim)
> or other solo études. Being technical studies, they may not contain the kind of information that you are looking for.
> 
> Another approach is to take the instrument in the context of being a soloist in an ensemble. Depending upon the degree of precision you need, determining the start of the onset can also be a problem, the sound of a flute or trumpet for example having elements in common with determining the start-time of a c-v syllable such as "too".
> 
> Can you provide a little more precision.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Kevin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 6/13/13, "Patel, Aniruddh D." <a.patel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Dear list,
>>  
>> I’m trying to find papers which report measurements of two aspects of note duration in solo instrumental monophonic music (e.g., recordings of solo violin, cello, trumpet, clarinet, flute, etc. – not piano, guitar, or other instruments that can play multiple notes simultaneously).
>>  
>> 1.       The average duration of notes in a piece
>> 2.       A histogram of note durations in the piece
>>  
>> Thus for example this solo cello prelude by JS Bach last about 4 minutes and contains N notes (anybody know?), so the average note duration in this piece is about N/240 notes/sec.  
>>  
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtLKjeEssAo
>>  
>> If one could measure the duration of each note in this recording, then one could plot the histogram of note durations in the piece.
>>  
>> Is anyone aware of such data for any solo monophonic instrument?  Musical style doesn’t matter (can be classical, folk, etc.).  
>> 
>> Thanks,
>>  
>> Ani Patel
>>  
>>  
>> Aniruddh D. Patel
>> Associate Professor
>> Dept. of Psychology
>> Tufts University
>> 490 Boston Ave.
>> Medford, MA 02115
>>  
>> a.patel@xxxxxxxxx
>> http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/peoplePatel.htm
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>